Yes, the Iran Revolution is a very big deal. I’ve been following it with great interest since it flared up.
From my reading, Mahsa Amini had her head caved in for wearing tight jeans, instead of ill-fitting baggy clothes that hide the feminine figure, and for wearing her hair partially loose and free, instead of hiding it, to prevent men from getting hard-ons.
It’s time for an end to draconian social restrictions, nearly all of them rooted in deep racism and deep sexism.
Yes, it is definitely time for a change. The question is HOW? It is a regime that, as you say, is deeply rooted in sexism ( not so sure where racism plays a part.) There clearly are many men there who approve of the policies of the current regime, and women too frightened and/or brainwashed to protest. So — what can we do?
Iran is ruled by a gang of sexual psychopaths, and nothing will really change until every last one of them is deposed and destroyed. I suspect that this move is just a feint by the fundamentalist government—a cosmetic change that will make very little difference in the outrageous ways that women are treated.
It’s totally pathetic. It’s completely, utterly, nauseatingly pathetic what some of these Middle Eastern cultures adopt as practices. No wonder the Iranian women are fucking sick and tired of it. What they put up with is outrageous. It makes most male Republican sexists look like toddlers in comparison.
One thing I really love about you, Judith, and several of the other women here:
You call it exactly like you see it. The vast majority of the time I agree exactly with your characterizations, and that goes for Dawna, too, and many others.
Gaetz was under investigation for the murder of his college roommate when his daddy stepped in and had the coroner change the cause of death. Then, there’s the Epstein connection…and those “other” rape accusations. He is a psychopath. . . With connections.
Holy shit! I did NOT know about any of that! Have not kept up with reading about Gaetz. All I know for sure is that his Jewish pal Greenberg is in jail and Gaetz —who should be in prison—is not.
Whoa! I had read somewhere about the college roommate's "mysterious" death under questionable circumstances...but I had NOT read about the subsequent 'fix' by Gaetz's Daddy! Not to mention the Epstein connection. That puts an entirely different complexion on interpretations of Gaetz's psyche
Brava to the women of Iran for their courageous action in the face of death. It was wonderful to learn today that the Morality Police would be disbanded. I hope this is a sustained victory for the Iranian women. Will our Supreme Court take note? Based on the questioning today, no they won’t.
Yes, the Ayatollah continues to reign supreme and it is he, as I understand it, who imposed the rigid dress rules for women and created the Morality Police. Seems to me that it is only he who can officially disband the Morality Police.
NPR says the word the official used means, loosely, the Morality Police have been abolished, but the meaning is ambiguous, so the current relative tolerance (obviously, not for protest) may be temporary.
We'll see, I hope so. I am reminded of the old adage, mankind will never be free until the last priest is strangled with the entrails of the last king, or Imam and Ayatollah in this case.
In 1979 it was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Ali Khamenei is the current supreme leader since 1989. I don’t know which one is responsible for the dress codes for women (only women) of recent times.
Some of the Republicans who want to ban contraception specifically refer to female contraceptives. Interesting that men can use condoms to prevent disease, and if pregnancy is prevented, well, that’s a side effect.
In cultures where women are responsible for the family’s honor and men are not, isn’t that arguing that men are weak creatures at the mercy of their hormones?
Thanks. I came over to suggest that Khomeini and Khamenei might have been mixed up here. The dress codes were instituted at the beginning of the Iranian revolution, and Khomeini was definitely in charge at the time.
P.S. It's not just "cultures where women are responsible for the family's honor" that this argument is made -- unless of course you're including our own among them. Men (and their lawyers) are *still* excusing violent behavior because of the way a woman was dressed, or where she was at the time, or her sexual history. And you don't have to do back very far in our history to find women being admonished to cover their ankles, or their knees, or their elbows, or whatever in order to keep men from losing control.
I think it's worse now, Susanna. The English language is being used against us. I'm suddenly no longer a woman. I choose not to dignify the three-letter prefix (rhymes with his) I'm supposed to add to describe my gender these days; I certainly won't use it. Apparently the only people allowed to describe themselves as women are trans. I don't mean to stir up a hornets nest. Having been told what's "ladylike," etc, my whole life this latest instruction is simply a weight added to the last straw. Who the hell started this? No one asked me. Bug off, gender language police! …
You "came over?" Does that mean you've cyber-moved?
Heh. I've been looking for places where the hornets are already at least a little bit stirred up, and so far they seem to be mostly in the UK. IMO the conflation of sex and gender is part of the anti-feminist backlash, because a key feminist point was and is that biology *isn't* destiny and that gender is socially constructed and fluid -- not binary. I'm also afraid that many liberals and progressives are just reacting to the right-wing rhetoric (which has a lot to do with right-wing essentialism about sex, sexuality, and gender roles) and not thinking things through. I could go on . . .
The "biology=destiny?" debate reminds me of Jill Johnston, so it goes way back. Even when she lost, Jill won every debate we ever had, and they formed most of our relationship during the 10ish years I edited her Village Voice column. Jill gets a chapter of the professional memoir I'll never write. I believed, and do, that women can do anything men can except physically. Jill didn't buy any such limitation. My best argument was elbows. Women can't be major league pitchers because our elbows are hinged differently, I'd argue—that's why women pitching hardball look so awkward. No sale. Facts like that were irrelevant to Jill. It's too bad her infamous "debate" with Norman Mailer wasn't. She expressed her Cage-Cunninghamian Zen another way (I wasn't there, but it made wiki). I'm sorry she never got a chance to take on Larry Summers.
True, my granny, born in the South in the 1870’s, was careful in her youth not to show her ankles. Her father would not allow her to attend high school, because he thought geometry was harmful to females.
As for female modesty in dress, I think if you are not selling, you shouldn’t advertise.
It’s not fair to tease. But violence can’t be excused as a legitimate response to false advertising.
Expecting women to control men's behavior has a long, long history, and it's not just about sex. Victims of what these days we euphemistically call "domestic violence" used to be regularly told by shrinks that they should be more understanding of their violent husbands or partners. (A friend of mine was advised to cook meals that her abusive husband liked. Fortunately she dumped both the shrink and the husband.) Too many men even these days think that a woman's appearance is all about them. It isn't. And the "incels" (so-called "involuntary celibates") blame all their problems on the women who won't have sex with them. And so on.
Applying Western logic to Western religious dogma doesn't go all that far either. :-) Compounding the problem is the history of Western meddling with and exploiting the Middle East, the Far East, and just about everywhere else they could reach.
Margartet Atwood took pains to NOT include anything in "The Handmaid's Tale" that hadn't already happened somewhere in the contemporary world; it barely qualifies as fiction!
Our fundamental failure in Afghanistan after the hunt for Bin Laden morphed into our first feminist war, was that we did not train the women of Afghanistan to be their own force to defend their own rights. We reinforced existing structures which like the South Vietnamese government were not very sound or effective.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is for women "to defend their own rights" even in countries like the U.S. that have a secular, liberal tradition in which those rights can be rooted? Women in Afghanistan had no such tradition. Our "fundamental failure" in Afghanistan, and Iraq, and South Vietnam, and various other places is not recognizing that our secular, liberal tradition can't be grafted on to other places. The assumption that it can be is both arrogant and ignorant at the same time.
I had to rub my eyes and look again when I saw this headline yesterday, but as you said in your piece, saying your abolishing the Morality Police and actually doing so are two very different things.
Woman Life Freedom. I simply cannot overstate my joy that Mahsa Amini, and all those other brave souls, did not die in vain.
It's of cold comfort to their families, I'm sure, and I hope there is some solace they may find.
It reminds me of Lincoln's Bixby letter; especially this part,
"I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."
Sadly many of the enforcers of repressive/restrictive sexual practices such as female genital mutilation are women, especially family members. Socially accepted customs are passed from generation to generation, with little or no input from those most affected. Any reforms are viewed as an affront to cultural/ religious community norms.
Consider the possibility that from the perspective of a girl's female relatives, a girl with intact genitals is unmarriageable, and without marriage prospects a girl has no future in a male-dominated society that has no room for independent women. (The footbinding inflicted on girls in upper-class and aspiring-to-upper-class families in pre-revolutionary China had a similar rationale.)
Now consider all the ways parents -- especially mothers -- of girls in our own society prepare their daughters to live in a world where many individuals of the male persuasion see them as prey and not entirely human. To ignore that wider world completely is negligence, but to go to the opposite extreme is to warp a girl's spirit and by extension her possibilities in life.
The two aren't the same, but there most definitely is a connection.
So women should submit eternally? That conflicts with the spirit you exhibit here all the time, Susanna. If things are ever going to change, would-be victims must fight back. Two waves of feminists have changed this country, and look at what women are doing in Iran today! Passivity as surely as resistance means death.
Did I say anything like that??? I did not. I did suggest that it's a good idea to consider the cultural context of a custom, any custom. What purposes does it serve, and how can the incentives and disincentives be changed to make resistance more possible and less likely to be fatal? And at the same time, is it a good idea for (secular) missionaries from a Western society to march in and try to "set things right" by their lights, especially when most of them have no clue how build and sustain a movement for social change? What the women in Iran are doing is great and very brave -- but keep in mind that previous uprisings have been squelched and if this one succeeds it'll be because conditions have changed: more Iranians are more fed up, less willing to put up with the religious restrictions. That matters. One death triggered a backlash. Previous deaths haven't. We'll see.
In the U.S. we're in the throes of a backlash that is anti-feminist as well as anti-democratic. It had been going on for decades before the advent of Trump woke a lot of people up. And it's *still* touch-and-go.
Of course you didn't say that; I presented it as the logical extension of what you did say.
Female genital mutilation: All I know is what I read in the papers. I can't fault anyone there for doing anything they think might stop that barbaric practice. (A friend, the mother of a half-Jewish son, feels that way about circumcision and organized in NYC in opposition.)
And I'm saying that oppressed people have to begin somewhere. Those who resist may not reap the rewards, indeed may perish, but their successors will start on higher ground—as has this new movement in Iran, on account of those who tried before and failed, even died. If this uprising fails, as it well may, it still makes it more likely a new one will succeed. As I've probably written before, my mother grew up before women could vote. Suffrage was a long time coming. I'm not persuaded a general anti-feminist backlash is happening anywhere in the U.S. except areas that have always been benighted. trump didn't invent ignorance.
The instructor of the second term of a celestial navigation course I once took there was the head of the Hayden Planetarium. He wore a bracelet that held the only key that could open a matching bracelet his wife wore. He never failed to address the class as "Gentlemen … ." I'm ashamed to admit I dropped out. That was then.
This is a volatile time. Autocratic regimes become sclerotic, at some point they fail. What is left is a vacuum of power, and opportunity for the most vicious and unprincipled of the dissidents to try to seize control. The aged clergy in control of Iran will not know how to surrender gracefully, or to cut a deal with a new generation of potential leaders. Revolutions in modern times seem to go through a common set of paradigms: first is the idealistic phase, at which point the conservative forces are routed, or they return to take back what they lost in the first battles. In the 1790s, the French Revolution went from moderation, and celebration of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man, to radicalization and dictatorship, ending with Napoleon. Revolutions of mid-19th century, Germany Austria and Poland in particular, failed. The attempted revolution in Russia in 1905 failed; the 1917 revolution initially followed the European pattern of having the middle class parties in charge, but that quickly descended into chaos, radicalization, and tyranny. In 1919 – 1920, the abortive revolution in Bavaria failed; and within months, reactionary forces rallied to suppress popular revolution throughout Germany, with such groups as the Frei Korps committing wholesale acts of murder to suppress liberal, democratic regime change. We are seeing the same sort of reactionary response in our own politics today.
Pluralism requires restraint, and a willingness to cooperate with people who used to be our enemies. By and large, United States has had a less than stellar track record in dealing with nascent governments that have succeeded tyrannies. The former Soviet Union is a case in point. The unification of Germany is a different story because the German Federal Republic assume responsibility for maintaining order and continuity in the former Soviet Occupation Zone known as the German Democratic Republic. The Baltic states, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, and Poland went through a rough transition ending with nationalistic, authoritarian regimes whose unifying and coordinating principal was hatred of Russia. Ukraine was a successor state to the failed Soviet Union, and they started out as a corrupt dictatorship that got steadily worse as time went on. The former imperial Duchy of Bohemia, now known as the Czech Republic, parted company with Slovakia because of their irreconcilable differences. They could do so and still maintain peace because they were surrounded by members of the European Union that were able to provide political, financial, and moral support for their independent existence.
The lesson for people who wish Iran well, and are willing to help, need to put their predilections aside and start with the fundamentals. It is exceedingly doubtful that a western style parliamentary democracy will be in Iran's future anytime soon. We learned from our experience with Iraq and Afghanistan, and Syria, and the whole of the Levant that the Western model of parliamentary government in this area is a foolish conceit. If we are going to defeat an entrenched regime composed of hardliners and religious fanatics, the way to defeat them is to take their religious triumphalism out of the picture and focus on a simple and effective nationalism. Iranians will continue to be Shiite Muslims from now until forever; what we want to promote is is sufficient amount of secularization that allow male and female Iranians, men and women of any age, to live and work together in relative harmony, without the arbitrary dictates of a religious hierarchy that makes arbitrary distinctions between men and women. Beyond that, we really do not have a dog in that fight. And they need to set their own goals and work things out amongst themselves, without a bunch of do-gooders, and NGO globalists trying to compete with one another through the kind of virtue signaling that seems to attract their kind, like flies to manure piles. That is what happened in China between 1911 and 1937, when Japan seized on China's weakness to invade Manchuria, and then the coastal provinces of mainland China. Somehow hard-liner Protestant missionaries always seem to become involved in the thick of it. Well, think about how well that worked out for them, and for us. Ditto, with Vietnam, then known as French Indochina, where we turn our backs on a nationalist movement in 1945, and we enabled the French government and military to assuage their bruised egos, by giving France enough military hardware left over from World War II to resume their generations old war with the Vietminh nationalists. This led inexorably to the Vietnam War, we sacrificed 58,000 dead, and untold numbers of wounded Americans; and which left in its wake, 200,000 dead civilians. We should be the last people to ever want to plant our flag on someone else's revolution. Needless to say, the American response was support her in every which way by a conservative Catholic hierarchy wanting to reaffirm Catholicism in what was then South Vietnam, principally Saigon, at the expense of the country's Buddhist majority. I do not know what their situation is like today, nor do I have any interest in finding out whether the Catholic hierarchy in Saigon survived the unification of North and South. Our over-concern for their well-being colored and contaminated our approach to dealing with the Vietnamese people as a whole.
We also need to suppress our need to find outside forces and other bogeymen in crafting our own response to these events. For decades, we assume that Red China was behind all the turmoil in Vietnam. It was not, not even close. That was the start of our troubles back in the 1950s, and that went on a decade after the Vietnam War ended in our client's defeat. I believe it was John Quincy Adams who urged his countrymen (us) not to go abroad looking for dragons to slay. Good advice, at any time in our national history. Unfortunately, we did that with George W. Bush, who is looking to spread democracy far and wide, and instead brought his own burden on those people in the form of death and destruction. I think we are finally learning our lesson in Ukraine. Give them the means to succeed, and cheer their success. The United States of America has not handled its venture into empire building with any degree of success. Our postwar tensions with the Soviet Union in the form of a Cold War have not been crowned with success and what happened afterward, principally in the Middle East. By culture and civilization, the United States is still tied to Western Europe, and its values and outlook. Ukraine is trying to hook up with Western civilization, and their chief adversary is Russia, with whom they share much of their religious heritage, and Eastern European culture. Theirs is a conscious choice to reject the autocracy of Russia as an historical entity. Vladimir Putin is one of many would-be czars that they are likely to encounter into the dim mists of the future. That sort of conflict can go on for generations; so, if we want Ukraine to succeed, we would want to help them succeed on their own using their own resources, and not be dependent upon us for permanent financial and logistical support. So far, were behaving that as we should be, but there is always the temptation to push things too far, because it makes us feel more powerful. Likewise, Iran is not within our sphere of influence; and we have no natural rivalry with them over anything that matters. We can wish them well, and do what we can, but the Iranian people are essentially on their own, to decide and effectuate their own future.
Iran has elected a very right-wing president. I don’t see how any meaningful permanent change in their barbaric misogyny is going to happen. I imagine that Iranian men are perfectly happy to keeping the women “in their place”. I hope the women keep it up because until that regime is overthrown, and all the mullahs are put on a reservation, no one is safe from their medieval ideas of what life is all about.
Yes, they do understand it is “the system” which is at risk and why they will never allow for the reforms to actually allow this nation to move into the 20th Century.
As much as we enjoy religious freedom and tolerance here it is impossible for us to imagine what living in a mono theocratic system is like. For young Iranians it is, yes, He’ll on Earth and the mullah intend to keep it that way. OBTW anyone who actually believes Iran will not build a nuclear weapon you likely also believe in a tooth fairy also.
i actually don't think that they have disbanded. i heard an iranian activist, a woman living here in the u.s., not to believe it, it is government propaganda.
My comment on women enforcing female genital mutilation was removed so l will resubmit it.
Cultural norms are transmitted from generation and what may be considered abusive to one community may be acceptable to another. The complicated part is to provide opportunities for changing norms while understanding that not everyone thinks alike.
But you are correct. It IS women who enforce these barbaric and painful customs on other women! They do so because they know that a woman whose genitalia have not been “altered” to make her incapable of sexual pleasure will never find a husband in those benighted cultures.
Removed? What does that mean? What is this—with 5 Likes a few comments above in my feed?:
"Sadly many of the enforcers of repressive/restrictive sexual practices such as female genital mutilation are women, especially family members. Socially accepted customs are passed from generation to generation, with little or no input from those most affected. Any reforms are viewed as an affront to cultural/ religious community norms." —Babette Albin
NEXT DAY: 7 Likes now (one of them mine). Again: "removed???"
Yes, the Iran Revolution is a very big deal. I’ve been following it with great interest since it flared up.
From my reading, Mahsa Amini had her head caved in for wearing tight jeans, instead of ill-fitting baggy clothes that hide the feminine figure, and for wearing her hair partially loose and free, instead of hiding it, to prevent men from getting hard-ons.
It’s time for an end to draconian social restrictions, nearly all of them rooted in deep racism and deep sexism.
Next up: China.
Yes, it is definitely time for a change. The question is HOW? It is a regime that, as you say, is deeply rooted in sexism ( not so sure where racism plays a part.) There clearly are many men there who approve of the policies of the current regime, and women too frightened and/or brainwashed to protest. So — what can we do?
Iran is ruled by a gang of sexual psychopaths, and nothing will really change until every last one of them is deposed and destroyed. I suspect that this move is just a feint by the fundamentalist government—a cosmetic change that will make very little difference in the outrageous ways that women are treated.
How can the men in countries that have these dress codes admit to the world that their self-control is so deficient? Then they expect respect?
They hate and control women their way, we have SCOTUS.
It’s totally pathetic. It’s completely, utterly, nauseatingly pathetic what some of these Middle Eastern cultures adopt as practices. No wonder the Iranian women are fucking sick and tired of it. What they put up with is outrageous. It makes most male Republican sexists look like toddlers in comparison.
Toddlers with their SCOTUS.
Our GOP is part of the same sexist/ fear of women continuum. Our guys are just not as far along toward the extreme as the Iranian rulers are.
Yup
Sounds a lot like the GOP--a gang of sexual psychopaths. Matt Gaetz and tRump spring to mind...
Absolutely true for tRump, but Gaetz strikes me as being more of a garden-variety schmuck and borderline pedophile than a true psycho.
One thing I really love about you, Judith, and several of the other women here:
You call it exactly like you see it. The vast majority of the time I agree exactly with your characterizations, and that goes for Dawna, too, and many others.
Thank you, Roland!
Gaetz was under investigation for the murder of his college roommate when his daddy stepped in and had the coroner change the cause of death. Then, there’s the Epstein connection…and those “other” rape accusations. He is a psychopath. . . With connections.
Holy shit! I did NOT know about any of that! Have not kept up with reading about Gaetz. All I know for sure is that his Jewish pal Greenberg is in jail and Gaetz —who should be in prison—is not.
Shit! I didn’t know that about Gaetz either! How come I’m not surprised?
Never forget, Gaetz is the best Lower Alabama can cough up...pitiful.
Whoa! I had read somewhere about the college roommate's "mysterious" death under questionable circumstances...but I had NOT read about the subsequent 'fix' by Gaetz's Daddy! Not to mention the Epstein connection. That puts an entirely different complexion on interpretations of Gaetz's psyche
Incels...
Sadly you are likely correct.
Brava to the women of Iran for their courageous action in the face of death. It was wonderful to learn today that the Morality Police would be disbanded. I hope this is a sustained victory for the Iranian women. Will our Supreme Court take note? Based on the questioning today, no they won’t.
I predict that the “Morality Police” will be replaced by some other, equally cruel and misogynistic force under a more attractive name.
And as for the impact of this feminist rebellion on the ultra-conservative wing of our SC, I suspect they sympathize with the mullahs.
Yup to sympathizing with the mullahs. Retch.
Yes, the Ayatollah continues to reign supreme and it is he, as I understand it, who imposed the rigid dress rules for women and created the Morality Police. Seems to me that it is only he who can officially disband the Morality Police.
Based on results...
NPR says the word the official used means, loosely, the Morality Police have been abolished, but the meaning is ambiguous, so the current relative tolerance (obviously, not for protest) may be temporary.
Our SCOTUS worse than Iran.
We'll see, I hope so. I am reminded of the old adage, mankind will never be free until the last priest is strangled with the entrails of the last king, or Imam and Ayatollah in this case.
In 1979 it was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Ali Khamenei is the current supreme leader since 1989. I don’t know which one is responsible for the dress codes for women (only women) of recent times.
Some of the Republicans who want to ban contraception specifically refer to female contraceptives. Interesting that men can use condoms to prevent disease, and if pregnancy is prevented, well, that’s a side effect.
In cultures where women are responsible for the family’s honor and men are not, isn’t that arguing that men are weak creatures at the mercy of their hormones?
Thanks. I came over to suggest that Khomeini and Khamenei might have been mixed up here. The dress codes were instituted at the beginning of the Iranian revolution, and Khomeini was definitely in charge at the time.
P.S. It's not just "cultures where women are responsible for the family's honor" that this argument is made -- unless of course you're including our own among them. Men (and their lawyers) are *still* excusing violent behavior because of the way a woman was dressed, or where she was at the time, or her sexual history. And you don't have to do back very far in our history to find women being admonished to cover their ankles, or their knees, or their elbows, or whatever in order to keep men from losing control.
I think it's worse now, Susanna. The English language is being used against us. I'm suddenly no longer a woman. I choose not to dignify the three-letter prefix (rhymes with his) I'm supposed to add to describe my gender these days; I certainly won't use it. Apparently the only people allowed to describe themselves as women are trans. I don't mean to stir up a hornets nest. Having been told what's "ladylike," etc, my whole life this latest instruction is simply a weight added to the last straw. Who the hell started this? No one asked me. Bug off, gender language police! …
You "came over?" Does that mean you've cyber-moved?
Heh. I've been looking for places where the hornets are already at least a little bit stirred up, and so far they seem to be mostly in the UK. IMO the conflation of sex and gender is part of the anti-feminist backlash, because a key feminist point was and is that biology *isn't* destiny and that gender is socially constructed and fluid -- not binary. I'm also afraid that many liberals and progressives are just reacting to the right-wing rhetoric (which has a lot to do with right-wing essentialism about sex, sexuality, and gender roles) and not thinking things through. I could go on . . .
The "biology=destiny?" debate reminds me of Jill Johnston, so it goes way back. Even when she lost, Jill won every debate we ever had, and they formed most of our relationship during the 10ish years I edited her Village Voice column. Jill gets a chapter of the professional memoir I'll never write. I believed, and do, that women can do anything men can except physically. Jill didn't buy any such limitation. My best argument was elbows. Women can't be major league pitchers because our elbows are hinged differently, I'd argue—that's why women pitching hardball look so awkward. No sale. Facts like that were irrelevant to Jill. It's too bad her infamous "debate" with Norman Mailer wasn't. She expressed her Cage-Cunninghamian Zen another way (I wasn't there, but it made wiki). I'm sorry she never got a chance to take on Larry Summers.
True, my granny, born in the South in the 1870’s, was careful in her youth not to show her ankles. Her father would not allow her to attend high school, because he thought geometry was harmful to females.
As for female modesty in dress, I think if you are not selling, you shouldn’t advertise.
It’s not fair to tease. But violence can’t be excused as a legitimate response to false advertising.
Expecting women to control men's behavior has a long, long history, and it's not just about sex. Victims of what these days we euphemistically call "domestic violence" used to be regularly told by shrinks that they should be more understanding of their violent husbands or partners. (A friend of mine was advised to cook meals that her abusive husband liked. Fortunately she dumped both the shrink and the husband.) Too many men even these days think that a woman's appearance is all about them. It isn't. And the "incels" (so-called "involuntary celibates") blame all their problems on the women who won't have sex with them. And so on.
Applying Western logic to Middle Eastern dogma goes nowhere, sadly.
Applying Western logic to Western religious dogma doesn't go all that far either. :-) Compounding the problem is the history of Western meddling with and exploiting the Middle East, the Far East, and just about everywhere else they could reach.
Iran is the ideal the GOP extremists yearn to reach with regard to the total oppression and control of women.
Meaning that Saudi is a bridge too far? ;-)
A Nat C principle.
Margartet Atwood took pains to NOT include anything in "The Handmaid's Tale" that hadn't already happened somewhere in the contemporary world; it barely qualifies as fiction!
Her description of the handmaiden in the bedroom sounded a lot like southern slave owners raping their slaves while forcing the wife to watch.
Our fundamental failure in Afghanistan after the hunt for Bin Laden morphed into our first feminist war, was that we did not train the women of Afghanistan to be their own force to defend their own rights. We reinforced existing structures which like the South Vietnamese government were not very sound or effective.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is for women "to defend their own rights" even in countries like the U.S. that have a secular, liberal tradition in which those rights can be rooted? Women in Afghanistan had no such tradition. Our "fundamental failure" in Afghanistan, and Iraq, and South Vietnam, and various other places is not recognizing that our secular, liberal tradition can't be grafted on to other places. The assumption that it can be is both arrogant and ignorant at the same time.
I had to rub my eyes and look again when I saw this headline yesterday, but as you said in your piece, saying your abolishing the Morality Police and actually doing so are two very different things.
WHOOOOHOOOO!!!!
Woman Life Freedom. I simply cannot overstate my joy that Mahsa Amini, and all those other brave souls, did not die in vain.
It's of cold comfort to their families, I'm sure, and I hope there is some solace they may find.
It reminds me of Lincoln's Bixby letter; especially this part,
"I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."
Now I tearing up a bit.
And I pray that yesterday's headlines and your joy are not premature.
Me too. In the meantime I'll celebrate.
Sadly many of the enforcers of repressive/restrictive sexual practices such as female genital mutilation are women, especially family members. Socially accepted customs are passed from generation to generation, with little or no input from those most affected. Any reforms are viewed as an affront to cultural/ religious community norms.
Consider the possibility that from the perspective of a girl's female relatives, a girl with intact genitals is unmarriageable, and without marriage prospects a girl has no future in a male-dominated society that has no room for independent women. (The footbinding inflicted on girls in upper-class and aspiring-to-upper-class families in pre-revolutionary China had a similar rationale.)
Now consider all the ways parents -- especially mothers -- of girls in our own society prepare their daughters to live in a world where many individuals of the male persuasion see them as prey and not entirely human. To ignore that wider world completely is negligence, but to go to the opposite extreme is to warp a girl's spirit and by extension her possibilities in life.
The two aren't the same, but there most definitely is a connection.
So women should submit eternally? That conflicts with the spirit you exhibit here all the time, Susanna. If things are ever going to change, would-be victims must fight back. Two waves of feminists have changed this country, and look at what women are doing in Iran today! Passivity as surely as resistance means death.
Did I say anything like that??? I did not. I did suggest that it's a good idea to consider the cultural context of a custom, any custom. What purposes does it serve, and how can the incentives and disincentives be changed to make resistance more possible and less likely to be fatal? And at the same time, is it a good idea for (secular) missionaries from a Western society to march in and try to "set things right" by their lights, especially when most of them have no clue how build and sustain a movement for social change? What the women in Iran are doing is great and very brave -- but keep in mind that previous uprisings have been squelched and if this one succeeds it'll be because conditions have changed: more Iranians are more fed up, less willing to put up with the religious restrictions. That matters. One death triggered a backlash. Previous deaths haven't. We'll see.
In the U.S. we're in the throes of a backlash that is anti-feminist as well as anti-democratic. It had been going on for decades before the advent of Trump woke a lot of people up. And it's *still* touch-and-go.
Of course you didn't say that; I presented it as the logical extension of what you did say.
Female genital mutilation: All I know is what I read in the papers. I can't fault anyone there for doing anything they think might stop that barbaric practice. (A friend, the mother of a half-Jewish son, feels that way about circumcision and organized in NYC in opposition.)
And I'm saying that oppressed people have to begin somewhere. Those who resist may not reap the rewards, indeed may perish, but their successors will start on higher ground—as has this new movement in Iran, on account of those who tried before and failed, even died. If this uprising fails, as it well may, it still makes it more likely a new one will succeed. As I've probably written before, my mother grew up before women could vote. Suffrage was a long time coming. I'm not persuaded a general anti-feminist backlash is happening anywhere in the U.S. except areas that have always been benighted. trump didn't invent ignorance.
The instructor of the second term of a celestial navigation course I once took there was the head of the Hayden Planetarium. He wore a bracelet that held the only key that could open a matching bracelet his wife wore. He never failed to address the class as "Gentlemen … ." I'm ashamed to admit I dropped out. That was then.
This is a volatile time. Autocratic regimes become sclerotic, at some point they fail. What is left is a vacuum of power, and opportunity for the most vicious and unprincipled of the dissidents to try to seize control. The aged clergy in control of Iran will not know how to surrender gracefully, or to cut a deal with a new generation of potential leaders. Revolutions in modern times seem to go through a common set of paradigms: first is the idealistic phase, at which point the conservative forces are routed, or they return to take back what they lost in the first battles. In the 1790s, the French Revolution went from moderation, and celebration of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man, to radicalization and dictatorship, ending with Napoleon. Revolutions of mid-19th century, Germany Austria and Poland in particular, failed. The attempted revolution in Russia in 1905 failed; the 1917 revolution initially followed the European pattern of having the middle class parties in charge, but that quickly descended into chaos, radicalization, and tyranny. In 1919 – 1920, the abortive revolution in Bavaria failed; and within months, reactionary forces rallied to suppress popular revolution throughout Germany, with such groups as the Frei Korps committing wholesale acts of murder to suppress liberal, democratic regime change. We are seeing the same sort of reactionary response in our own politics today.
Pluralism requires restraint, and a willingness to cooperate with people who used to be our enemies. By and large, United States has had a less than stellar track record in dealing with nascent governments that have succeeded tyrannies. The former Soviet Union is a case in point. The unification of Germany is a different story because the German Federal Republic assume responsibility for maintaining order and continuity in the former Soviet Occupation Zone known as the German Democratic Republic. The Baltic states, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, and Poland went through a rough transition ending with nationalistic, authoritarian regimes whose unifying and coordinating principal was hatred of Russia. Ukraine was a successor state to the failed Soviet Union, and they started out as a corrupt dictatorship that got steadily worse as time went on. The former imperial Duchy of Bohemia, now known as the Czech Republic, parted company with Slovakia because of their irreconcilable differences. They could do so and still maintain peace because they were surrounded by members of the European Union that were able to provide political, financial, and moral support for their independent existence.
The lesson for people who wish Iran well, and are willing to help, need to put their predilections aside and start with the fundamentals. It is exceedingly doubtful that a western style parliamentary democracy will be in Iran's future anytime soon. We learned from our experience with Iraq and Afghanistan, and Syria, and the whole of the Levant that the Western model of parliamentary government in this area is a foolish conceit. If we are going to defeat an entrenched regime composed of hardliners and religious fanatics, the way to defeat them is to take their religious triumphalism out of the picture and focus on a simple and effective nationalism. Iranians will continue to be Shiite Muslims from now until forever; what we want to promote is is sufficient amount of secularization that allow male and female Iranians, men and women of any age, to live and work together in relative harmony, without the arbitrary dictates of a religious hierarchy that makes arbitrary distinctions between men and women. Beyond that, we really do not have a dog in that fight. And they need to set their own goals and work things out amongst themselves, without a bunch of do-gooders, and NGO globalists trying to compete with one another through the kind of virtue signaling that seems to attract their kind, like flies to manure piles. That is what happened in China between 1911 and 1937, when Japan seized on China's weakness to invade Manchuria, and then the coastal provinces of mainland China. Somehow hard-liner Protestant missionaries always seem to become involved in the thick of it. Well, think about how well that worked out for them, and for us. Ditto, with Vietnam, then known as French Indochina, where we turn our backs on a nationalist movement in 1945, and we enabled the French government and military to assuage their bruised egos, by giving France enough military hardware left over from World War II to resume their generations old war with the Vietminh nationalists. This led inexorably to the Vietnam War, we sacrificed 58,000 dead, and untold numbers of wounded Americans; and which left in its wake, 200,000 dead civilians. We should be the last people to ever want to plant our flag on someone else's revolution. Needless to say, the American response was support her in every which way by a conservative Catholic hierarchy wanting to reaffirm Catholicism in what was then South Vietnam, principally Saigon, at the expense of the country's Buddhist majority. I do not know what their situation is like today, nor do I have any interest in finding out whether the Catholic hierarchy in Saigon survived the unification of North and South. Our over-concern for their well-being colored and contaminated our approach to dealing with the Vietnamese people as a whole.
We also need to suppress our need to find outside forces and other bogeymen in crafting our own response to these events. For decades, we assume that Red China was behind all the turmoil in Vietnam. It was not, not even close. That was the start of our troubles back in the 1950s, and that went on a decade after the Vietnam War ended in our client's defeat. I believe it was John Quincy Adams who urged his countrymen (us) not to go abroad looking for dragons to slay. Good advice, at any time in our national history. Unfortunately, we did that with George W. Bush, who is looking to spread democracy far and wide, and instead brought his own burden on those people in the form of death and destruction. I think we are finally learning our lesson in Ukraine. Give them the means to succeed, and cheer their success. The United States of America has not handled its venture into empire building with any degree of success. Our postwar tensions with the Soviet Union in the form of a Cold War have not been crowned with success and what happened afterward, principally in the Middle East. By culture and civilization, the United States is still tied to Western Europe, and its values and outlook. Ukraine is trying to hook up with Western civilization, and their chief adversary is Russia, with whom they share much of their religious heritage, and Eastern European culture. Theirs is a conscious choice to reject the autocracy of Russia as an historical entity. Vladimir Putin is one of many would-be czars that they are likely to encounter into the dim mists of the future. That sort of conflict can go on for generations; so, if we want Ukraine to succeed, we would want to help them succeed on their own using their own resources, and not be dependent upon us for permanent financial and logistical support. So far, were behaving that as we should be, but there is always the temptation to push things too far, because it makes us feel more powerful. Likewise, Iran is not within our sphere of influence; and we have no natural rivalry with them over anything that matters. We can wish them well, and do what we can, but the Iranian people are essentially on their own, to decide and effectuate their own future.
Thanks. Great essay! Listen to history
Iran has elected a very right-wing president. I don’t see how any meaningful permanent change in their barbaric misogyny is going to happen. I imagine that Iranian men are perfectly happy to keeping the women “in their place”. I hope the women keep it up because until that regime is overthrown, and all the mullahs are put on a reservation, no one is safe from their medieval ideas of what life is all about.
Yes, they do understand it is “the system” which is at risk and why they will never allow for the reforms to actually allow this nation to move into the 20th Century.
As much as we enjoy religious freedom and tolerance here it is impossible for us to imagine what living in a mono theocratic system is like. For young Iranians it is, yes, He’ll on Earth and the mullah intend to keep it that way. OBTW anyone who actually believes Iran will not build a nuclear weapon you likely also believe in a tooth fairy also.
And Iran is supplying weapons to Russia to use against Ukraine.
Exactly what the Nat C movement here is striving for.
i actually don't think that they have disbanded. i heard an iranian activist, a woman living here in the u.s., not to believe it, it is government propaganda.
Iran is a gangster state hiding behind religion.
My comment on women enforcing female genital mutilation was removed so l will resubmit it.
Cultural norms are transmitted from generation and what may be considered abusive to one community may be acceptable to another. The complicated part is to provide opportunities for changing norms while understanding that not everyone thinks alike.
No one can remove comments but me, and I didn't remove any comment of yours.
But you are correct. It IS women who enforce these barbaric and painful customs on other women! They do so because they know that a woman whose genitalia have not been “altered” to make her incapable of sexual pleasure will never find a husband in those benighted cultures.
As a college student in the late 60's I remember Middle Eastern grad students in hog heaven enjoying liberated women, just like the rest of us!
Removed? What does that mean? What is this—with 5 Likes a few comments above in my feed?:
"Sadly many of the enforcers of repressive/restrictive sexual practices such as female genital mutilation are women, especially family members. Socially accepted customs are passed from generation to generation, with little or no input from those most affected. Any reforms are viewed as an affront to cultural/ religious community norms." —Babette Albin
NEXT DAY: 7 Likes now (one of them mine). Again: "removed???"